Mahagony
A Novel
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book
Édouard Glissant’s novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people’s loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters’ lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree.
Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place—a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Glissant (The Overseer's Cabin), canonized in the Caribbean for his poetry, novels, and critical theory, offers a dazzling history of colonialism in Martinique, originally published in 1997 and here translated into English for the first time. The book is framed by the musings of contemporary metafictional narrator Mathieu on Martinique's ubiquitous and ancient mahogany trees, which he believes possess historical memory, and of his role in the story: "I—simultaneously the man, the author and the one depicted as parable—felt the triple entity of this story that I was going to have to relive as such random, opposite kinds of person." Multiple narrators from the past few centuries surface, and they coalesce around the stories of "Gani the maroon," who was murdered in the 1830s by a party hunting for escaped slaves, and "Mani the murderer," who killed a white soldier in retaliation for a rampage on Black peasants. Glissant (1928–2011) is as comprehensive as he is unconcerned with the encumbrance of linearity, and has found the perfect form to explore the inescapable and reverberating legacies of colonialism. This is a transcendent work of art.
